


Les peaux de chèvres de chagrin

by Kainosite



Category: La Comédie Humaine - Honoré de Balzac, Les Chouans - Honoré de Balzac
Genre: Captivity, Chouannerie, Class Differences, Forced to Huddle for Warmth with Rapist, Inhumanly Brief Refractory Period, Inhumanly deep anal penetration, Kidnapping, M/M, Multi, Randy Weregoats, Ravaged by Livestock, Weregoats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-29 13:37:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19401412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kainosite/pseuds/Kainosite
Summary: When Corentin is captured by the Chouans, he quickly discovers that the enigmatic Breton peasants have been guarding deeper secrets than royalism.Being held for a doomed hostage exchange may turn out to be the least of his problems.





	1. The Abduction

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Esteliel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Esteliel/gifts).



> With gratitude to J, who came up with elegant solutions to this fic's problems that I totally ignored in favor of my clumsy ones.
> 
> Readers who are here for the weregoats and not for kidnapping and counter-insurgency tactics in Consulate-era Brittany should be advised that the racy bit does not begin until Chapter 2, and they may wish to skip ahead.

With sublime indifference to the military needs of the Republic, a thick fog had descended upon the town of Fougères just when its defenders most needed to see their enemy.

For five months, the departments of the West had been plagued by a resurgence of the counter-revolutionary violence which had engulfed them at the dawn of the new era. The Chouans of Upper Brittany had rallied under the banner of an energetic new general, the Marquis de Montauran, whose attacks against the few loyal towns in the region and the badly outnumbered republican troops their veteran commander Hulot could scarcely manage to contain. Hulot had repeatedly begged his superiors in Paris for more resources and more men, but his entreaties were in vain, for the beleaguered government was attacked on all fronts and had none to spare. News of the commandant’s plight had at last reached the sympathetic ears of the Minister of Police, who despatched his agents to dispose of the leader of the insurrection, this so-called Gars, and thereby resolve through espionage a problem that seemed to admit to no military solution.

A tempting pot of honey had been laid out for the marquis, the gallant gadfly was duly ensnared, even the substantial complication of the lynchpin of the scheme defecting to the enemy had been overcome through sheer ingenuity and a little slight of hand – and now it seemed like the whole stratagem might collapse on account of the weather, for even the most ardently patriotic of troops could not shoot what they could not see. For hours Fougères had been drowned in a clammy darkness, scarcely relieved by the thin streaks of light where here and there an open window in the houses above the ramparts or in the little suburb of Saint-Sulpice below cast the feeble light of a lamp or a candle into the heavy air. At last the moon rose to illuminate the human drama playing out along the walls, but its silvery glow obscured as much it revealed, for beneath its rays the fog became a luminous mist that eroded all shape and form into a uniform grey blankness.

As Corentin paced the circuit of the Promenade for what had to be the fortieth or fiftieth time that night, the trees and buildings that he passed took on a spectral hue. Nothing cast a proper shadow; nothing had a sharp outline. In the queer, ubiquitous half-light the familiar shapes were transformed into a strange phantasmagoria, rising up before him with the abruptness of startled birds and then vanishing behind him as completely if they’d been fashioned from scraps of mist, dissolving into the fog with the wind of his passage. On such a night, it was easy to see how the town had earned its sinister reputation in the surrounding countryside as the abode of sorcerers.

The eerie beauty of this otherworldly scene was entirely lost on Corentin, who had a rather desiccated sense of wonder at the best of times and who was currently far too busy seething over his last conversation with Commandant Hulot to reflect upon the interesting qualities of the moonlit fog. Indeed, Corentin was too caught up in his mental recriminations to take much notice of his surroundings at all. It was only by the force of habit that he avoided walking into a tree.

He had _tried_ to work with Hulot, he truly had! He had waited until the last possible moment to deploy his letter of authorization from the Ministry of War, knowing how much Hulot would resent the coercion. He had tried to deal with the commandant on equal terms, consulting him in everything, patiently enduring all his jibes and insults, offering not a word of criticism when Hulot let the Gars slip through his fingers at Gibarry. Hulot had begged Paris for help, Paris had sent it in a form that could end the royalist insurrection without mass slaughter, and Hulot chose to spit on it – very well! Let him think what he wished. They didn’t have to be friends. The police couldn’t expect to be well-liked, and perhaps it was too much to ask that a soldier appreciate any solution to a problem more sophisticated than adding more men and more gunpowder and shooting at it until it was dead.

But really, was it too much to ask that a soldier obey orders? If the desire to avenge his murdered friends was not enough to motivate Hulot, surely basic military discipline should have sufficed. Perhaps Corentin should have put more effort into managing him earlier, but he shouldn’t _need_ to manage him. They were meant to be on the same side! From the level of zeal Hulot was displaying, anyone would think it was the commandant and not Corentin’s pretty colleague Marie who had gone over to the royalists. If that damned marquis escaped now, after all their preparations, because Hulot could not be bothered to make a simple arrest–!

So preoccupied was Corentin by these frustrations that he did not notice the figure approaching him out of the fog until it punched him in the gut.

He doubled over and gasped for breath, whereupon his assailant seized him about the waist, clapped a hand over his mouth, and lifted him bodily over the balustrade that separated the Promenade from the steep fall of rocks below. While Corentin scrabbled for purchase on the narrow ledge, too stunned by the abrupt change in his circumstances and his sudden proximity to the edge of the precipice to offer any real resistance, his captor vaulted over the barrier after him and caught him about the waist once more. Corentin clutched at the masonry behind him and tried to pull free without sending himself over the edge, but he found that he was held quite fast, with an iron strength that might perhaps have been expected from one who had effortlessly lifted a grown man, albeit a small, slender one, over a three-foot railing. An attempt to pull away the hand covering his mouth proved equally futile.

His captor edged sideways along the cliff, following a steep incline of the schist down to the terrace below and balancing on the slick rocks as nimbly as a goat. Corentin found that he had no choice but to accompany him. Too violent a struggle would risk overbalancing them both, and however dire his current circumstances, they were preferable to a broken neck. His muffled protests went entirely ignored, except that his captor maneuvered his thumb and forefinger to pinch shut Corentin’s nostrils. It was more pleasant to be kidnapped than to be suffocated and kidnapped, and his stifled cries had entirely failed to summon aid, so Corentin took the point and shut up. After a pause to make sure he’d learned his lesson, his captor permitted him to breathe again.

Every so often a small stone loosened by their passage went clattering down the slope. Each time his captor halted their slow shuffle along the cliff and froze until he was certain there were no alarms above, but neither the patter of falling rocks nor Corentin’s earlier protests elicited so much as a “Who goes there?” from the soldiers up on the ramparts. Either Hulot’s worthless sentries had yet again failed to notice the telltale sounds of their enemies scaling the cliff, or the commandant had for once issued a sensible order. Thanks to Corentin’s vigilance they already knew the valley of the Nançon was swarming with Chouans, but the Gars was the real prize, and he was in the town, not clambering around the rocks at the base of the fortifications. It would be foolish to alert him to their ambush with a round of gunfire, especially in a fog so thick that the soldiers couldn’t see their targets.

Corentin was grateful for their forbearance, but even without a hail of bullets to enliven the journey it was a slow, perilous descent to the terrace below. In the fog they seemed to be suspended over a white void, and with every step Corentin feared that either he or his captor would lose his footing on the damp stones and send them both careening down the face of the cliff into oblivion. But would the fate awaiting him at the bottom be any kinder even if he reached it in one piece? Corentin had yet to get a proper look at his abductor, but the hand over his mouth smelt of wet earth, with a distinct undertone of wet goat. That rancid odor alone would have been enough to tell him who had seized him.

He had fallen into the hands of the Chouans, perhaps the very same who but ten days before had murdered the sixty-five men in Marie de Verneuil’s escort in cold blood. And that was the least of their crimes. In annals of Chouannerie, the deaths of a few careless soldiers counted for nothing – it was the terror the counter-revolutionaries had wreaked on civilians, on their own countrymen and neighbors, that had brought Corentin to Brittany to put down the insurrection. Murders, rapes, maimings, torture, arson, brigandry… the list of atrocities was a long one, and none of the items were the sort to bring comfort to a hostage.

Neither did the fact that his abductor might very easily have slit his throat up on the Promenade, and instead had chosen to take Corentin alive at considerable risk to himself. Corentin might have failed to fully appreciate the mystical qualities of the fog, but when it came to the darker elements of human nature he had a vivid imagination fueled by long experience. In his youth he had acted on behalf of the government in two repressions, first of the Federalists and then of the Jacobins. One could not grow up as he had without learning the full depths to which men could sink when the bonds of law and society were loosed and politics came to divide them from their fellow men. These Breton peasants had been brigands and smugglers before the Revolution; now their priests told them they murdered and pillaged on behalf of God himself. There was no crime of which they were not capable. Whatever they wanted him for, he doubted very much that he would enjoy it.

Plagued by such misgivings, it was almost with regret that he reached the end of the harrowing descent and stepped down from the rock of the cliff to the packed earth of the footpath that wound around its base. Immediately three figures converged on them out of the fog, all armed with muskets and clad in the shaggy goatskins that made them appear, at first glance, like stray gorse bushes or outcroppings of the rough stone.

“What the _hell_ , Rit-des-Plaies–?“ one whispered.

“That up there is a trap,” Corentin’s captor whispered back grimly, “and I don’t fancy walking into it. I’ve caught us a hostage instead.”

There was a soft exclamation in Breton, rapidly shushed by the others. All four were silent for a moment, but Hulot’s soldiers no more responded to this than they had to Corentin’s kidnapping.

“But Rit-des-Plaies,” said a man who had not yet spoken, a great hulking fellow in a piebald goatskin, “I don’t understand. How are we to fight if we’re dragging a prisoner along with us?”

“We’re not going to fight. I’ve had a look round; there must be a hundred Blues up there. Marche-à-Terre and the Grande Garce have lost their minds if they think we can shoot our way out of that. If Marche-à-Terre can slip the Gars out from under their noses, well and good. If he can’t, maybe they’ll trade the Gars for one of their own,” Rit-des-Plaies said, giving Corentin a rough shake.

“Not likely,” said the first speaker, “when they’ve been hunting him for a month.”

“They let the Comte de Bauvan go,” Piebald pointed out.

“Aye, well, the Comte de Bauvan – I wouldn’t waste a bullet on him either.”

“But they will spend one on you, Coup-Bas,” Rit-des-Plaies said. “A whole fusillade, I don’t doubt. If you want to get yourself shot on this fool’s errand that’s your business, but I’m not for it.”

Coup-Bas scowled, but it seemed this had settled the argument. The fourth member of the party asked a question in Breton – a less hostile one, from the sound of things – and there followed a brief, incomprehensible exchange.

Since coming to Brittany Corentin had tried to get someone to teach him the language, but after ten days in Fougères he scarcely knew a word. The servants in town were ashamed to speak it, and he could barely get Francine to speak to him in French, much less instruct him in the base language of her childhood. He had thought it a pity, as having a little Breton might prove handy and it would have been something to occupy his mind through the long, empty hours of watching Marie’s house. He had never imagined that his life might depend on it.

He was still cursing himself for not offering the servants a more generous bribe to teach him when Rit-des-Plaies leaned in and murmured in his ear,

“Make the least sound and your friends up there will fire, and in this fog they’re as likely to punch a nice hole through your head as they are through mine. Do we understand each other?”

On the evidence of their descent Corentin thought it unlikely the soldiers would fire at anyone, but it seemed equally unlikely that if he shouted for help the Blues would come dashing to his rescue, or at any rate be able to achieve it before one of these villains cut his throat. There was a remote chance that Hulot might be willing to trade him for the marquis so as to save himself the trouble of a court-martial – that would come down to whether he hated Corentin more than paperwork, a question too finely balanced for Corentin to judge – but Hulot had ordered his men to do their very best _not_ to take Montauran alive, and though they were poor sentries they were efficient killers.

In all likelihood, if Corentin wanted to live he was going to have to arrange his own escape. It struck him that his odds of accomplishing this would be substantially improved if he had the use of his tongue. Besides, cooperation could only work to gain him his captors’ goodwill, such as it was. He nodded as best he could with the Chouan’s hand still covering his mouth, and Rit-des-Plaies gave him a warning shake and then released him.

Before Corentin even had the chance to scrub at his face to banish the unpleasant sensation of his abductor’s hand, his cravat was whipped from around his neck, his arms were wretched behind his back, and the fabric was used to bind his hands tightly together behind him. A quick search stripped him of his purse, his watch and his pocket-knife – as if _that_ was likely to do him a bit of good against four heavily armed men – and then Rit-des-Plaies dismissed him with a shove between the shoulder blades. Corentin stumbled forward, and the Chouans laughed as he was abruptly checked by a jerk on his wrists. The cravat was long enough that a length of leftover muslin trailed from his bound hands like a leash, and Rit-des-Plaies was holding fast to the other end.

“Very handy,” said Coup-Bas, “But we can hardly stroll into town with a hostage like a calf on market day, even if you have made a halter for him. What do you propose to do with him?”

“We’ll cross the river and find somewhere to stash him over in Saint-Sulpice until we know how things stand with the Gars,” said Rit-des-Plaies. 

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Corentin said quietly. “The commandant’s sent fifty men down there to cut off your retreat. You won’t make it across the bridge.”

“Trustworthy counsel I’m sure,” sneered Coup-Bas.

“Like your comrade said, if the Blues fire on us they’ll kill us all.”

“It’s all terraced gardens on this side,” Piebald said. “They won’t search ‘em at night, not even with fifty men. Not in this fog. Why don’t we go upstream a little ways and hide him there?”

“You’re right, it’s the safest place. Come along, _kañfard_ ,” Rit-des-Plaies said to Corentin, seizing him by the elbow and pulling him along.

It was easier crossing the lawns and flowerbeds below the footpath than it had been climbing down the cliff, but Corentin was acutely conscious that every step was taking him farther away from safety. While he’d been the prisoner of only one Chouan it had been possible to imagine breaking free from his captor and dashing off into the fog – and straight into the soldiers’ guns, no doubt, if he made for the gates of the town, but at least he would have a chance. It hard to see how he was going to get away from four of them, especially with his hands bound behind him.

When they’d climbed down several terraces they discovered a withered clump of hydrangeas growing up against the terrace wall. The dry petals had not yet fallen, and the Chouans all agreed it was the best cover they were likely to find in the winter gardens.

“Two of us should stay here with the prisoner, and two should go up to see how things fare with the Gars. That way if one is shot there will still be someone to report back. I tell you, I nearly broke my pipe up there. There are soldiers everywhere; it won’t be easy going,” warned Rit-des-Plaies.

“You and me, then,” said Coup-Bas. ”Armérie’s no use as a spy, and that damned spotted skin of Brochette’s shows up even in this fog.”

“All right.” Rit-des-Plaies handed off Corentin’s leash to Piebald – Brochette, presumably. “Keep good hold of him and don’t let him try anything.”

The fourth Chouan, a young man in a pale goatskin, asked something else in Breton. Corentin was starting to get the impression he had very little French, which raised the question of why the rest of them kept speaking it – not for their hostage’s benefit, certainly. But perhaps they weren’t all fluent in Breton either. Montauran had drawn in every scoundrel in Brittany to be part of his little army of brigands, and the more civilized regions to the east spoke French.

“What a good question,” Coup-Bas said with poisonous courtesy. “How _are_ we going to parlay with Hulot without getting ourselves shot?” 

“Let’s find out whether we need to, first.” Rit-des-Plaies clapped Brochette on the shoulder. “You and Armérie sit tight, and we’ll be back as soon as we have news.”

“Armérie?” Corentin asked, when the other two had gone. As a nom de guerre it lacked a certain bloodthirsty cachet.

Brochette shrugged. “He’s from Saint-Brieuc.”

“But it’s a flower,” said Corentin, who had been confounded by the botanical nature of the sobriquet, not by whether the pink blossoms could be found in the vicinity of Fougères.

“They’re pretty,” said Armérie, which answered the question of whether he spoke any French.

“Well, I suppose it’s appropriate to the venue,” Corentin conceded, looking around the foggy gardens, and went to crouch in the hydrangeas at the maximum allowance of his leash. The Chouans’ cloaks were redolent of goat, and he preferred to stay as far from the reeking skins as possible.

Although Rit-des-Plaies and Coup-Bas could not have been gone an hour, it was a tense, chilly vigil for those waiting below. A few minutes after the others had left, they heard the tramp of soldiers marching on the path above, just fifteen meters away – the troops Hulot had sent to attack the Papegaut Tower from below. They were invisible in the fog and maintained a disciplined silence, but they were so close that the hidden Chouans and their prisoner could hear the scuff of their footsteps even over the murmur of the Nançon. It occurred to Corentin that these soldiers might be his salvation, but no sooner had the thought crossed his mind than his leash was yanked backwards, wrenching his wrists painfully and pulling him down onto his arse on the frigid earth. He opened his mouth to protest the rough treatment and found a dagger at his throat.

“Make a sound and you die,” Brochette hissed in his ear, and then added diffidently, “Nothing personal.”

Corentin intended to take it _extremely_ personally if these filthy peasants killed him as part of their ridiculous, doomed insurrection, but he thought it more prudent to be polite.

“No hard feelings,” he whispered back. “But the ground is cold, so would you please give me enough slack to sit up?”

This was permitted, and Brochette eventually came to have enough confidence in his prisoner to rest the dagger in Corentin’s lap instead of pressing it under his chin – or perhaps his arm just grew tired.

The fog was starting to disperse, and they began to feel dangerously exposed beneath the rising moon. The Chouans were becoming noticeably uneasy. Brochette made some abortive gestures toward bringing the dagger back up to Corentin’s neck, although he always seemed to think better of it, and Armérie had started shredding the hydrangeas. The increased visibility unnerved even Corentin, and he _wanted_ to be found, although ideally not while someone was holding a knife a centimeter away from his vital organs. Worse, the clearing air brought with it an abrupt fall in temperature. The Chouans seemed perfectly comfortable in their goatskins, but Corentin, whose garments had never been intended for squatting in a bush in the middle of a winter’s night, was soon shivering.

Half an hour in there was a burst of gunfire in the vicinity of Marie’s house beside the church, which was promptly followed by a volley from the footpath just above them as the detachment Hulot had sent to the base of the tower followed suit. Soon after there was another volley from the direction of the Saint-Léonard Gate. The Blues above them kept up a steady fire, and a new fog of gun smoke soon rose up to conceal their hiding place in the hydrangeas.

It was impossible to know who might be alive or dead in that rain of bullets. In between volleys there was a great deal of running around and shouting orders from the soldiers on the footpath, but for all the information it was possible to glean from it, they might as well have been shouting in Breton. The agony of waiting was doubled for Corentin, who hardly knew what to hope for. The death of the Gars would be a triumph both professional and personal: the success of his mission here in Brittany and another battle won in his long war of attrition for Marie’s hand. But it would also mean the end of his value to his kidnappers. They might yet be persuaded to trade for information or to hold him for ransom – the Chouans did have a habit of extorting money from their victims whenever possible – but it was far from a certainty. Corentin wanted the marquis dead, but not at the cost of his own life.

Rit-des-Plaies and Coup-Bas returned a short while later, scrambling along the stone wall of the terrace in a crouching run to hide themselves from the soldiers above. They didn’t announce their arrival with so much as owl cry, not daring to risk the traditional signal with so many soldiers near, and there was a tense moment before Armérie was satisfied that the two goatskin-clad figures were indeed his comrades and not Counter-Chouans in disguise, but at length they managed to establish their identities and lead the little band down to the riverside where they could speak more freely.

“They’ve shot the Gars, comrades,” Rit-des-Plaies told them, when the bright sound of the water was loud enough to mask his words.

“Ah well,” said Brochette philosophically, and brought his dagger up to draw it across Corentin’s throat.

“Wait! Idiot!” Rit-des-Plaies hissed, and the arc of the blade was arrested. Corentin, who had been paralyzed with shock by the abruptness of the gesture, drew in a shaky breath. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten his peril, exactly, but he’d spent the last hour practically sitting in Brochette’s lap, sharing the boredom and all the little terrors of his vigil. It had been a sort of companionship – an unwilling one, true, and one conducted at knifepoint, but intimate and fairly amiable for all of that. Corentin hadn’t expected to be murdered with so little preamble.

“We can’t trade him for the Gars, but we can still ransom him,” Rit-des-Plaies continued. “He’s rich; he was sent from Paris. They’ll pay to get him back.”

“Rich! This ragamuffin? His coat doesn’t even cover his waistcoat!” Coup-Bas scoffed.

“That’s the fashion, you donkey. It was cut that way. Look at the cuffs and collar; they’re not even frayed.”

“It’s good wool,” Brochette put in, a trifle apologetically. “I should know, I’ve been holding onto it for an hour.”

Coup-Bas stomped over to them and pawed roughly at Corentin’s clothing for a moment. He grunted an acknowledgement of the point and then said, “I still think we should kill him. A kidnapping is more trouble than it’s worth.”

“You, bourgeois. How much will they pay for you?” Rit-des-Plaies asked.

Corentin doubted they’d pay a sou. Fouché or Peyrade would go to some trouble to get him back, but they were seventy-five leagues away in Paris. Here in Fougères it was just Hulot and the civil authorities, the mayor Loisel and the other officials of the town. Hulot would gladly see Corentin dead, and he was the military governor of the department; the mayor had to work with him, whereas Corentin would be gone within a week whether he was rescued or not. If Loisel had half a brain he’d see where his interests lay. Nobody was going to lift a finger on Corentin’s behalf.

But of course he wasn’t going to tell the Chouans that.

“Oh, five hundred crowns, I should think,” he said loftily, putting on his most insufferably Clichyen tones.

It was a large enough figure to be tempting but small enough to sound plausible. Hulot and the civil administration could put it together easily enough from the municipal funds and the leftover money in Corentin’s saddlebags – why, Hulot could supply almost half the sum from that old peasant woman’s purse alone. The Ministry of Police would naturally reimburse him upon Corentin’s safe return.

They weren’t going to pay the ransom, but they _could_.

Brochette whistled. “Five hundred crowns!”

“And where are we to keep him in the meantime?” Coup-Bas asked. “If we’re still here at dawn the Blues will pay us out in lead.”

“He has legs, doesn’t he? We’ll take him a few leagues from the town and stash him in a farmhouse somewhere,” said Brochette, who had been converted into a kidnapping enthusiast by the mention of five hundred crowns.

Rit-des-Plaies shook his head. “No, not there. All the people round here answer to that damned Marche-à-Terre, and if he gets wind of this he’ll make us split the ransom with him. If we bring the _kañfard_ to a farm he’ll hear of it by morning. We’ll take him off into the woods, then no one need know what’s afoot but the four of us.”

“Well, but shouldn’t we tell Marche-à-Terre?” Brochette asked, a little uneasily. “He won’t like it if he hears we’ve been conducting our own private affairs.”

“And how did his public affair go?” exclaimed Rit-des-Plaies. “Leading us into a swarm of Blues, getting the Gars killed!”

“The Gars got himself killed straying into a garrisoned town like a halfwit. But I don’t see why we should share our loot with that swine Marche-à-Terre when he’s had no hand in earning it. Bring your _diavésiad_ if you must, but in the name of Saint Anne let us go, and let us go now,” Coup-Bas said, with a nervous glance up the terraces toward the town.

“To the Queen’s Staircase, then?”

“No, we can’t go that way. Our little Blue was telling the truth,” Rit-des-Plaies said, patting Corentin on the shoulder with proprietary fondness. “They hold the bridges. We’ll have to ford the Nançon.”

“In December?” Brochette asked incredulously.

“You can wade through cold water or hot lead, comrade, but it’s going to have to be one or the other,” Coup-Bas said.

Corentin, who could see a significant flaw in this plan even apart from how it was leading him away from the safety and shelter of Fougères towards the dubious comforts of the forest, felt compelled to intervene.

“Reluctant though I am to insert myself into a dispute between friends, doesn’t Brochette have a point? If we get soaked through in this weather and you have nowhere we can take refuge and dry our clothing on the far side, we’re all going to freeze to death before you can collect your ransom.”

Rit-des-Plaies laughed. “Don’t worry, _kañfard_. As light as you are, I could carry you across like a woman. But there’s no need for it: the water is six inches deep here.”

“Yes, you’ll be nice and dry in those fine boots of yours. _We_ are going to have to take off our shoes,” said Coup-Bas, giving Corentin a sour look, and promptly sat down on the riverbank and set about putting his words into action.

Brochette grumbled but joined him, keeping hold of Corentin’s leash all the while, and soon all four Chouans had their shoes, stockings and gaiters in their hands or tied together and slung around their necks. Rit-des-Plaies led the group into the Nançon, and Corentin was herded in after him. He took some small satisfaction in the pained gasps of the men behind him as they stepped into the icy water. He did indeed have good boots, and he felt only a slight chill from the river swirling around his ankles.

“Saint Anne of Auray, that’s cold,” Brochette moaned, splashing along after him. “I’d give a share of the ransom for a nice fire to warm ourselves by once we get out of this! Are you _sure_ we can’t stop at a farmhouse?”

“If you’re volunteering to give up your share, I have no objections,” Coup-Bas said.

“Bastard,” said Brochette, in good humor.

The little Nançon was only four meters across. The swift current tugged at Corentin’s feet and he had to walk with some care to avoid slipping on the loose stones at the bottom, especially since he could not extend his arms for balance, but he managed to make it to the far side without falling. The river was not, despite Rit-des-Plaies’ assurances, a uniform six inches deep – in one place Corentin’s boot sank so far into the mud that the water nearly came in over the top – but his feet were still dry when he climbed out onto the opposite bank.

The Chouans were not so fortunate. The moment that they reached the bank they threw themselves down on the grass and began to vigorously rub their feet dry on the long hair of their goatskins, trying to warm themselves after their immersion in the frigid stream.

For a brief time Corentin was the only member of the party standing upright, and consequently the only person with a high enough vantage point to see over the low stone wall that protected the market gardens lining this side of the river from the depredations of the local goats. He was therefore the only one to spot the gleam of bayonets a short distance away in the Place du Marchix.

He didn’t know who the men were or what they were doing there. Perhaps Hulot had decided to send a second detachment through the Saint-Sulpice Gate to secure this bank of the Nançon, or perhaps the National Guard of Fougères had been awakened by the disturbances and mustered to mount a night patrol. But whoever they were, they were certainly republicans: the mismatched collection of hunting rifles and old muskets the Chouans were using for weaponry seldom had the capacity to take bayonets. Not one of Corentin’s kidnappers had one, whereas Corentin counted at least five in the Place du Marchix. And the patrol was close enough to aid him without being so close that if he drew their attention he would instantly be cut down by their fire.

There was a second consequence to the Chouans’ preoccupation with toweling off their feet. In Brochette’s eagerness to restore feeling to his frozen toes, he had momentarily set down Corentin’s leash.

Corentin had no time to consider. In a moment his captors would once again have their shoes on their feet and their arms in their hands, and he would lose his chance.

“Hey! There are some Chouans here for you!” he called to the Blues, and darted away from his captors.

There was a shout from the square and a chorus of oaths behind him, but Corentin paid no heed to any of it, for he was straining every fiber in a headlong sprint along the garden wall. It blocked him from running directly toward the Blues – which might have been a mistake in any case, as they had already begun to fire – and with his hands bound behind him he couldn’t climb over the wall, but he could run along the bank. Soon enough he would be in among the houses of Saint-Sulpice, where he hoped he might lose his pursuers.

For pursuers he certainly had. The Chouans’ first act had been to fire at the Blues from the cover of the wall, but from the heavy tread behind him Corentin knew that at least one of them had come after him rather than taking the time to reload, and shoes or no shoes, the man was gaining on him. Corentin had never been a terribly fast runner, and crouching in the cold for an hour was not an ideal preparation for a race. His bound hands hampered him more than he could have imagined, and his breath was searing in his lungs. Even with fear to spur him on he was beginning to tire.

The moonlit chase took on the horrible quality of a dream, in which Corentin ran and ran but never seemed to gain ground. The houses were still hopelessly out of reach when the man behind him leapt onto his back and tackled him to the riverbank.

With no hands to catch himself and another man’s weight atop him, Corentin landed with a jarring force that dashed all the breath from his body. His captor gripped the back of his skull and ground his face into the dirt for good measure, and then snarled in his ear, “What the devil do you think you’re playing at? _Diavésiad kasauz!_ ”

With some surprise, Corentin realized he’d been recaptured by Coup-Bas. Out of all of the kidnappers, he was the one Corentin would least have expected to come after him.

“You could have let me go,” he said sullenly, spitting out dirt and bits of dried grass. “You’re against this plan anyway.”

“I could have shot you, is what I could have done, but I needed my bullet for the Blues.” Coup-Bas picked Corentin up off the ground, spun him around and dealt him a vicious backhand across the face. “Don’t try that again, or I’ll really give you a hiding. Bad enough you’re putting us to all this trouble without bringing the Blues down upon us and forcing me to come running after you.”

The blow had split Corentin’s lip, and his mouth was filling with the coppery taste of blood. He wanted to argue – it was pretty rich to blame him for his own abduction, and it certainly hadn’t been _his_ idea for Coup-Bas to chase him! – but although he was still emboldened by the bitterness of his disappointment, his face stung savagely and he was not quite brave enough to invite another blow. He waited until Coup-Bas had spun him around again and was rapidly marching him back to the others to say indignantly,

“You can’t expect me to just meekly allow myself to be kidnapped!”

“I expect you not to behave like a fool. Where were you running to, with your hands bound behind you? Where were you planning to hide? Did you think you could knock on the door of one of the houses and persuade them to let you in – you, a foreigner, when we control the country and Saint-Sulpice is outside the walls of Fougères, ripe for plunder or burning whenever we please? Did you think you could come running up to the Blues out of the dark and hope not be shot or spitted on their bayonets? Ah, get down!” Coup-Bas placed a hand on Corentin’s head to push him down into a crouch below the wall, for they had come within range of the Blues’ guns.

Looking down, Corentin noticed that one of the Chouan’s feet was still bare. He couldn’t even outrun a man wearing only one shoe.

The worst of it was, he was beginning to fear that Coup-Bas was right, and this had been not just a chance gone awry but a major miscalculation. Corentin had known all along that his best hope lay in gaining the Chouans’ trust and manipulating them into a situation that would allow him to escape, not in taking advantage of a momentary lapse in attention. But the speed and nonchalance with which Brochette had moved to slit his throat had shaken him more than he realized. It was hard to maintain his confidence in the strategy when his cooperation and good faith met with such a reward, and this, along with his mounting anxiety at being dragged away from the town with its familiar streets and its large garrison of friendly troops into the unknown and hostile countryside, had led him to make a rash and precipitate decision. With no time to think, he had acted on instinct, and his instinct had been wrong.

It was alarming to think that he was entirely dependent on his wits for his survival and they were playing him false. Coup-Bas was right: this venture had never had much hope of success, and Corentin should have had the sense to see that before he ran. And there was something particularly dispiriting about receiving this admonition – not to mention being saved from the bullets of his own allies – from the man who most vehemently wanted him dead.

By the time they got back to the others Corentin was feeling thoroughly disheartened. Coup-Bas shoved him at Rit-des-Plaies with a curse and went to find his other shoe, and Corentin once again found himself in the hands of his abductor. He thought for a moment that he might be hit again, for the Chouan leader’s expression was stormy, but between his disappointment and Coup-Bas’ lecture and nervous exhaustion Corentin was embarrassingly close to tears, and Rit-des-Plaies must have read his sincere contrition in his face.

“Sit there and don’t you dare move again until I give the word,” he told him sharply, taking up Corentin’s leash and pointing to a spot along the wall, and that was all the reprimand Corentin received for his attempted escape.

The Chouans were trading shots with the Blues across the gardens, each faction entrenched behind the cover of one of the surrounding walls. It must have been a National Guard patrol after all, or else Hulot’s men were spreading themselves dangerously thin, for there were only six of them, too few for any real file-firing. The Blues had a slight advantage in numbers and they could reload their guns more quickly, for Brochette had a hunting rifle instead of a straight-bored musket and the Chouans had already run out of cartridges, but both sides had good cover and the Chouans were the better marksmen. The result was that except for a minor flesh wound Brochette had dealt one of the Blues earlier in the firefight, the whole lot of them were just dinging bits of stone off the walls.

Time was on the side of the republicans, however, for they had reinforcements who sooner or later would surely hear the sound of the engagement and come along the riverbank to encircle the Chouans from behind, while the Chouans had no resources beyond their own courage and audacity. In between volleys they had been gradually advancing in the direction of Saint-Sulpice, but as soon as Coup-Bas had recovered his shoe and rejoined the group, Rit-des-Plaies gave the order for them to move out in earnest. Ducking low behind the wall, each of them occasionally dropping back to pop off a shot at the Blues to keep them pinned behind their cover, the four Chouans retraced Corentin’s steps. Corentin was passed between them like a shuttlecock, handed off to whomever was not firing or reloading, but this time they made sure that someone always kept hold of his arm or his leash.

In little more time than it had taken Corentin to run the distance himself, they came to the place where the gardens and the wall terminated against the side of a house. The Blues had by now realized what the Chouans were about and followed them as far as they could, but for the moment they were trapped: on their side of the gardens the wall simply turned a corner, and if they came any closer they would have to leave their cover and expose themselves to the Chouans’ bullets.

The cliffs of Saint-Sulpice rose up in dark crags behind the houses of the suburb, promising relative safety for the kidnappers, but to reach them the Chouans would have to cross the open space of the Place du Marchix and go along the street until they could find a gap in the houses. As they peered around the corner of the house, the white road gleamed tauntingly at them in the moonlight, peaceful and still. They would have no choice but to run directly across the Blues’ line of fire.

“Saint Anne of Auray, but that little game of yours is going to cost us a pint of blood,” Rit-des-Plaies told Corentin grimly. Corentin, who was coming to the realization that in giving the Blues their location he might well have signed his own death warrant, could only nod in weary agreement. On top of everything else, the triple run along the garden wall had left him short of breath.

“Couldn’t we wait just a minute?” he asked feebly.

“What, to give your friends over by the bridge a chance to wonder what all the noise is about and send a party around to investigate?” Coup-Bas asked. “No chance. The moment Armérie gets over here–“ for the fourth member of the party had lingered by the wall to take a final shot at the Blues– “we run. If you’re tired you have only yourself to blame.”

“That’s true enough, but if he’s dead weight it won’t just be him who pays for it,” Brochette said.

“Good point, it’s your fault too. You were supposed to be watching him. Why don’t you take him across?”

“If it comes to close quarters Brochette is better with his knife than you are, and I have the only sword,” said Rit-des-Plaies, drawing his saber. “So it’ll have to be you who takes him.”

Coup-Bas cursed and seized Corentin’s arm. “Fine. I suppose I can always use him as a shield.”

“And here’s Armérie. Go!” snapped Rit-des-Plaies, and then Corentin was yanked to his feet and they were sprinting across the road.

There was a shout from the Blues, and a round of fire. A bullet whizzed past Corentin’s ear and someone yelped, but none of the Chouans fell. Soon they were pounding past the houses in a temporary lull as the Blues paused to reload. By now there was a stabbing pain in Corentin’s side – an ordinary stitch, he sincerely hoped, and not a bullet – and he stumbled, but Coup-Bas hauled him back to his feet without missing a stride. Half running, half dragged, he was pulled into the safety of the shadows in a narrow alley between buildings. They had reached a gap in the row of houses on the far side of the road.

Over his ragged breath Corentin could hear the sound of running footsteps; the Blues were coming after them. Brochette was hastily reloading his rifle.

“Someone was hit?” Rit-des-Plaies asked quietly.

“ _Ma gar. Ur giñaden – mann ebet,_ ” said Armérie. Whatever this meant, it was apparently reassuring, for Rit-des-Plaies nodded, and Coup-Bas relaxed his bruising grip on Corentin’s arm.

“Coup-Bas, you and Armérie take the _kañfard_ and go on ahead. We’ll give the Blues a little surprise and follow after,” Rit-des-Plaies said.

“All right.” Coup-Bas hauled Corentin along again as they went between the houses and into someone’s backyard, past a chicken coop and through a tangle of washing lines. Corentin was short enough to duck, but the Chouans were ensnared and swore violently as they clawed themselves free. Behind them in the street they heard a shot, and then the clash of swordplay. They came to a grassy verge, and then they were in among the trees and fallen rocks at the base of the crags. To Corentin the high cliff looked like an impenetrable wall in the moonlight, with no clear path in any direction, but Coup-Bas was picking his way confidently through the rubble at the base with the air of a man who knew where he was going.

Soon Rit-des-Plaies and Brochette came jogging up to them.

“They’ll think twice about following us now. Brochette got one of them and there’s another that won’t live to see the dawn. Phew, what a run! I never thought we’d all make it across in one piece,” Rit-des-Plaies said.

“It’s just a good thing you didn’t grab a _fat_ bourgeois,” Coup-Bas said, and the Chouans all burst out laughing, with the euphoria of released tension. Corentin was glad there seemed to be no hard feelings over his failed escape, and he was relieved that he’d come through it alive, but he couldn’t join in their merriment.

Two of the Blues dead, and for what? His kidnappers had lost a little time, perhaps, and that was all. Corentin didn’t blame himself for the deaths; the republicans had the advantage of numbers, and the Chouans hadn’t even been holding their weapons when he gave away their position. If the Blues couldn’t get a few of them it was their own damned fault. It appeared they were even worse marksmen than they were sentries. But it was difficult to see the whole venture as anything but a colossal failure.

“What a mess, though,” Coup-Bas said, when the laughter had died down. “How’d he get away in the first place? What the hell were you doing, Brochette?”

“Putting on my shoes,” Brochette replied phlegmatically.

“Just for that, you can be in charge of dragging him up the cliff,” said Rit-des-Plaies, and handed him Corentin’s leash. Coup-Bas finally released him, and Corentin flexed his arms unhappily. He wanted to rub his shoulder where the Chouan’s fingers had dug in, but of course that was impossible with his hands bound. He didn’t think asking them to untie him would go over well, under the circumstances.

Armérie said something in a rueful tone.

“We want them to know we have him, _diod_. Otherwise how will they know to ransom him?” Coup-Bas said scornfully.

“They don’t know to ransom him,” said Rit-des-Plaies. “Since they have no idea who we are or what we’re asking for him. We’ll have to send someone to treat with them tomorrow. But for now, let’s get out of here.”


	2. The Weregoats

The route the Chouans chose took them up the cliffs at an angle where they couldn’t be observed from the ramparts of the town. There was a path of sorts, but it was not a very good one. The moonlight cast deceptive shadows that made it difficult to judge the dips and ridges in the rough trail, and the rocks were still slick from the fog. 

Corentin found it very hard going. Unable to use his hands for balance or to help him climb, he slipped and stumbled constantly, and periodically he would trip and bark his knees on the stones. Brochette was climbing behind him, and his grip on the leash was enough to stop Corentin falling flat on his face, but every time Corentin tripped and pulled the cravat taut he jarred his wrists and shoulders. It was unpleasant for both of them, annoying when the path was wide but downright hazardous once it narrowed and began to have a sheer drop-off on the left-hand side. The switchback they were climbing crossed the face of the cliff, and a serious fall here could get him killed, and perhaps Brochette too if he dragged the Chouan down with him. Corentin was placing his feet as carefully as he could, but he was exhausted, and Rit-des-Plaies and Brochette kept hurrying him along and forcing him to go faster. It was only a matter of time before he tripped again.

The instrument of his undoing was a root from one of the hardy gorse bushes that grew along the cliffs, cunningly concealed in the bush’s shadow. Corentin’s toe caught on the hidden snare and he went sprawling, not merely onto his knees but onto his belly, for this time he had fallen so hard that he pulled Brochette down as well. His head was dangling over the edge of the precipice. Looking down, he saw below him six fathoms of empty air. He swallowed hard and rolled himself back onto the path.

Brochette pulled him to his feet, giving him an exasperated shake.

“Don’t they teach you how to walk in Paris?” the Chouan asked irritably.

“At this rate he’ll have you both over,” said Coup-Bas, who was climbing behind Brochette and had been repeatedly forced to stop while Corentin got back on his feet. There was a certain satisfaction in the prediction.

“You try climbing wet rocks in the dark with your hands bound behind you!” Corentin snapped, at the end of both his literal and metaphorical tether. All he wanted was to lie down in a nice warm bed and sleep. Instead he was being dragged off to parts unknown by a gang of ruffians hoping for a nonexistent ransom, and if he didn’t plunge to his death on this awful trail he was certainly going to dislocate both his shoulders. And then to crown it all they, the very ones who had made it impossible for him to climb safely, had the nerve to mock him for falling!

“You shut up,” said Brochette, cuffing Corentin on the ear. He turned to Coup-Bas. “What do you want me to do? I can’t carry him!”

“You could,” said Rit-des-Plaies, who had come back to see what all the commotion was about.

“On a cliff? He’s light but he’s not that light.”

“Not over your shoulder. The other way.”

Brochette’s brow wrinkled. “You want me to do _that_ in front of the foreigner?”

“Eh, we can cut out his tongue before we give him back. Or sooner,” Rit-des-Plaies added pointedly, looking reprovingly at Corentin.

“If I bleed to death before you can ransom me you won’t get paid,” Corentin reminded them, anxious to curtail this line of thought.

“Best you keep your trap shut then, for all our sakes,” Rit-des-Plaies said.

He edged cautiously around Corentin on the path and took his leash from Brochette, who went past them to a flat outcropping of schist that rose beside the cliff a few paces further up the way. Brochette leaned his rifle against the cliff, sat down on the outcrop, and inexplicably began stripping off his clothes. Corentin watched in complete bewilderment as he pulled off first the piebald goatskin cloak, then his round felt hat, his great hobnailed boots, his leather belt with its wallet and powder horn, a jacket of blue serge, coarse linen breeches and a waistcoat in the same material, and at last his shirt and stockings. He carefully bound boots and clothing up in his shirt, which he tied into a tight bundle, and then he stood up again, stark naked in the moonlight.

Brochette picked up the goatskin from the rock, swept it about his shoulders once more, and… something happened.

Corentin was a spy both by predilection and by profession. It was his instinct to observe every detail he saw around him, however inconsequential or incomprehensible it might appear, and he had been trained since childhood to sift through this swirling mass of detritus for the hidden threads that wove together to reveal the shape of a crime or a conspiracy, and then to articulate what he had found in a denunciation. Every day the people around him betrayed themselves with a word, a look, a smile, and society’s secret currents were as visible to him as the bright play of light on its surface. For a man like Corentin, the universe held no mysteries.

And yet, when he was asked later what he had seen on that path in the moonlight, he could describe it no better than this.

The air around Brochette _folded_ , like crumpled paper. A gust of wind blew past, and for a moment the form of the Chouan blurred, like an image seen through a dirty windowpane. And then the air unfolded, and there standing on the path before Corentin was not a man, but a goat.

In form it was like the common goats one saw everywhere in the departments of the West: grazing along the ridges that lined each field or the ditches beside the road, staked out before the wretched huts of the peasantry or being driven in a little herd by a child with a stick. Long-haired, variable in color, with broad twisting horns, they were hardy, independent-minded creatures, able to subsist on meagre forage and minimal care and nevertheless supply their masters with milk, meat and the ubiquitous goatskins. The people here called them the ‘cows of the poor’, and indeed with their patched black or brown coats many did have the look of cattle from a distance.

This one was half again the size of any Corentin had seen – it must have stood more than a meter high at the shoulder, and the span of its horns was as long as his arm – and its coat bore precisely the same piebald pattern as Brochette’s goatskin cloak. It shook its bearded head once, as if to clear it, and then trotted back down the path towards them.

“What,” said Corentin.

Corentin was a modern man, a man of science, but first and last he was a spy. He trusted in his judgement and the evidence of his own eyes, and it was not in his nature to deny the existence of something that he had clearly witnessed even if reason told him it was impossible. He was frightened and distressed by his captivity and so tired that he was tripping over his own feet, but he was still, as far as he could tell, in his right mind. He was not hallucinating, and if he was going to start hallucinating his brain would never have come up with something as ridiculous as this.

However unlikely, the simple fact was that Brochette had turned into a goat.

Corentin believed it. He didn’t like it, and he suspected he would like it even less once he’d had time to properly think through the implications, but he believed it.

“Your mount, monsieur,” said Rit-des-Plaies ironically.

“You want me to ride the goat?” asked Corentin, who perhaps could be forgiven under the circumstances for not following the thread of his captors’ thoughts with his usual acuteness.

Coup-Bas smirked. “What, don’t you know how to ride? A gentleman like you? And you wearing those hussars’ boots and all!”

“I don’t know how to ride a _goat_ up a _cliff_!” said Corentin, at a pitch that indicated he had not entirely come to terms with Brochette’s metamorphosis. He tried to get a grip, if not on the situation, then at least on his voice. “There’s no saddle. Won’t I just… slide off? At the very least you’ll to have to untie my hands so I can hold on.”

“He’s right, you know,” said Coup-Bas.

“No, he isn’t,” said Rit-des-Plaies. Nevertheless, he came to Corentin and untied his hands, a task that was accomplished only after much cursing, since two hours of yanking on the leash had pulled the knots tight. As Corentin tried to rub some feeling back into his chafed wrists, the Chouan leader took him by the arm and led him over to the goat.

“Climb on.”

If Brochette’s goatskin had given off an insalubrious miasma when worn by a Chouan, its distinctive odor was infinitely enhanced now that it was worn by an actual goat. Corentin blanched as the pungent scent hit his nostrils and tried to back away, but Rit-des-Plaies caught him by the collar and shoved him back toward the goat.

“Now, _kañfard_ ,” he ordered pitilessly.

“All right, all right, I’m going.”

Gingerly, Corentin took hold of the crest of coarse hair that rose from the beast’s shoulders, swung a leg over and pulled himself astride. The goat – the weregoat? Brochette? – bleated unhappily, but it braced its legs as he mounted and it seemed to bear up well enough under his weight.

To Corentin’s dismay, Rit-des-Plaies approached again with his cravat.

“Oh, please don’t. We’re on a cliff, where could I run to?” Corentin asked miserably. Both his wrists were marked by deep welts where the twisted muslin had dug into his flesh, and the skin was scraped raw from the abrasion of the fabric. The last thing he wanted was to be bound again.

“Take hold of the base of his horns,” Rit-des-Plaies said, ignoring his entreaties, and reluctantly, Corentin complied. The Chouan wound the fabric around the goat’s horns a few times and then secured Corentin’s wrists to this new anchorage.

“There you are. You’ll stay on. Just hold on tight with your knees.”

The weregoat gave another unhappy bleat at this suggestion, but Rit-des-Plaies seemed to have no more sympathy for its complaints than he did for Corentin’s, for he turned away and began walking up the path. When he came to the outcropping, he picked up the bundle of clothes and Brochette’s rifle and waited for them to join him.

“Here,” he said, when Coup-Bas had caught up to them, tossing the rifle to him.

“Why don’t you take it?”

“I’m on point.”

“So why don’t you take the rifle, and I’ll take point?” Coup-Bas asked, but he backed down in the face of Rit-des-Plaies’ scowl. Grudgingly, he slung the strap over his shoulders so that the gun rested beside his own.

“Fine, I’ll take it. But he can carry his own damned boots. Tie them on in front of the Blue.”

This being duly accomplished, they set out once again. The goat was far more sure-footed than Corentin had been on the slick stones and they made much better time, but Corentin’s initial relief at no longer needing to walk was swiftly eclipsed by the discovery that there was a very good reason why people didn’t ride goats, apart from the smell. The creature’s spine lay just below the skin, without a cushioning layer of muscle as there was on a horse. Riding it bareback was like trying to ride a saber.

Furthermore, the bundle of clothing, which had been thrust into Corentin’s lap and loosely attached to the goat’s horns with a dangling strand of his cravat, jounced up and down obnoxiously with every step. This must have been at least as unpleasant for the goat as it was for him, for it gave a discontented bleat every time the bundle jostled against its neck. Eventually Corentin realized it would be less annoying for both of them if he took up the slack in the tether and held the bundle tight against the underside of the creature’s horns so it could no longer bounce. He was so pleased with his ingenuity that they were nearing the top of the crags before he noticed that by holding the bundle in this way, he had brought the knot securing it to his cravat within his reach.

When he bound Corentin’s hands to the horns of the goat, Rit-des-Plaies had made very sure that the knots were all in front, where he couldn’t get at them. But Brochette’s clothes had been added into the configuration as a sloppy afterthought, and when it came to them the Chouan had taken no such precautions. Corentin didn’t actually need to hold on to the weregoat’s horns to keep his seat, for his wrists had been fastened very securely and it made little difference to his balance whether he held the horns or just pulled against his bonds. So he was at liberty to use his fingers to pick apart the knot. The only question was whether or not he should. 

The Oratorians had been stronger on natural history than fairy tales, but there was a copy of the Lais of Marie de France in the school library at Vendôme which the eight-year-old Corentin had read with interest. Among them was the story of Bisclavret, a Breton baron who spent three nights a week in the form of a werewolf. When his wife learned his secret, she was repulsed and no longer wished to sleep with her monstrous husband, so she cleverly tricked him into revealing the mechanism of his transformation. Armed with this knowledge she was able to trap Bisclavret in his wolf form. The werewolf was forced to flee into the wilderness, and the treacherous wife was freed to marry her lover.

Young Corentin’s sympathies had lain all with the wife. Indeed, although she’d inevitably received her comeuppance in the end, he’d rather envied her – the true forms of the monsters preying on him were not so easily exposed, and at that age he could see no way to secure their exile from society. Over the years he’d forgotten most of the other stories, but Bisclavret had been his favorite, and he still remembered it with clarity. The lai made no mention of a wolfskin, but Bisclavret’s transformation had worked almost in reverse – he needed his human clothes to return to human form, and his wife had trapped him by stealing them from their hiding place.

Might the same trick not work on a weregoat? Perhaps not, but it couldn’t hurt to try. At the very least, his mount might not be keen on running around the wintry countryside clad in nothing but a goatskin. Brochette would have quite a job menacing him with a knife in his current state, and the fewer of Corentin’s captors in condition to fire a gun, the better. No doubt the Chouans would be cross when they discovered what he had done, but Corentin felt he had a degree of plausible deniability – Rit-des-Plaies had tied a shoddy knot, and it might well have come loose without any aid from him.

His hands were bound too far apart for his thumbs to touch, which made untying knots difficult, but after a little experimentation he discovered that he could brace the bundle against the goat’s horns with his left hand while he worked at the knot with his right. After a few minutes of persistent prying, he managed to loosen the knot far enough to pull the end of the fabric through and free the bundle. He dropped it after imparting it with a subtle spin to give it some momentum, and to his delight, the ball of clothes rolled across the path, plunged over the edge of the cliff, and went bouncing down the hillside until it was lost from sight somewhere in the valley below.

“ _Mâb-kast,_ ” Coup-Bas said behind him, in a tone of profound exasperation.

Rit-des-Plaies paused to let them catch up. “What’s happened?”

“Your pet Blue chucked Brochette’s clothes off the mountain,” Coup-Bas said, coming up beside them and clouting Corentin on the side of the head. He hit hard enough that Corentin was knocked halfway off the weregoat into the wall of rock on their right, and since Corentin’s hands were still tied to its horns it had to scramble frantically sideways to avoid being knocked over with him.

The goat turned its head to give them both what Corentin presumed was, from a goat, an absolutely filthy look.

“Behhh,” it said, very reproachfully.

Corentin was unsure to which of them this remark was addressed, so he turned to Rit-des-Plaies to make his case.

“How could I? My hands are bound,” he said, putting on his most innocent expression and wiggling his fingers feebly.

Rit-des-Plaies looked skeptical, but whatever Corentin’s guilt or innocence, there was plainly nothing that could be done about it now. After a moment the Chouan leader just shook his head and started moving up the path again.

Soon afterwards they reached the top of the crags. They passed through the scrubland of gorse and boulders that lined the cliff’s edge and into the fields beyond. When the little band came to the margin of the first field and clambered up the ridge that marked its border, Corentin’s mount planted its hooves and refused to take another step.

“Beh,” said the weregoat emphatically, stamping a foot.

“Oh, right, we’ll take him down,” said Rit-des-Plaies. He untied Corentin’s hands and let him dismount. Corentin thought that, all things considered, this was probably not the best time to make a fuss about having his hands bound, and meekly placed them behind his back so Rit-des-Plaies could tie them again. If this gesture of conciliation did not fully atone for the matter of the clothes bundle – and he suspected it did not, for Rit-des-Plaies still looked dour, and Coup-Bas gave him another box on the ear as he was climbing up the ridge – it at least earned him an approving pat on the shoulder, although he noticed that Rit-des-Plaies still kept hold of the leash.

The weregoat made no attempt to turn back into a Chouan. Instead it kept looking longingly back toward the cliffs and the lost bundle. It would seem that Marie de France knew of what she spoke.

“Better not,” said Coup-Bas. “You’ll never find it in the dark, and the place is crawling with Blues like a kicked-over ant hill. Come back tomorrow.”

When Corentin’s hands had been retied and Armérie had finally caught up to them, his leash was handed off to Coup-Bas and they struck out across the fields, mounting and descending the high boundary ridges according to a logic only the Chouans understood. The roads were heavy at this time of year, but even trudging through the mud would have been faster than trying to traverse the bocage. It was prudent, of course, for armed men in goatskins to avoid the major thoroughfares, but Hulot’s troops weren’t guarding the roads at this hour of the morning. Perhaps it was not the Blues his captors sought to avoid, but the spies of the mysterious Marche-à-Terre.

From the position of the moon in the sky behind them Corentin estimated they were going roughly north, but beyond that he was not sure of their destination. The Ministry of Police had a superb atlas, and before he left Paris he had spent a few dull hours copying out the map of Brittany until he could produce a reasonable facsimile from memory. If he recalled correctly, there were two patches of woodland in the immediate vicinity that might be large enough to conceal a hostage from prying eyes: the Forest of Fougères to the northeast of the town, and the unnamed tract of woodland around Marignay, on the road to Saint James. Which one they were heading toward, he couldn’t say, and their cross-country route avoided all the landmarks that might have given him a clue.

In truth, he might not have noticed a landmark even if they had passed it, for he was falling into a trance of exhaustion. It was as much as he could do to keep putting one foot in front of the other. The excitement from his brush with death in Saint-Sulpice had long since faded, and jolting up the side of a cliff on the back of a goat had not been much of a rest. Several times Rit-des-Plaies or Coup-Bas had to help him up the side of one of the boundary ridges. He thought they would have chided him more for lagging if not for that fact that Armérie was lagging too, as he had been ever since Saint-Sulpice. He was limping a little, and there was a dark patch of blood on one of his gaiters.

When they had traveled about two leagues in this haphazard way, they came to the edge of a forest. The trees had shed most of their leaves, but the branches overhead were so tightly interwoven that the moonlight failed to penetrate the canopy, and it was almost pitch black beneath the boughs. Perhaps goats had better eyes than men, because Rit-des-Plaies dropped back and let Brochette take the lead, and the weregoat never seemed to trip over a root or walk into a tree. It guided them unfailingly down the wide avenues between the trees, its white spots the only thing that was visible in all that realm of shadows.

After a time they came to a clearing where a giant of the forest had fallen and opened up a gap in the canopy. The moonlight streamed down, so bright after the darkness under the trees that Corentin wanted to shield his eyes. In these woods there seemed to be scarcely any underbrush; as he trudged along there had been nothing beneath his boots but the crackle of dried leaves. Either the people of the surrounding villages were clearing it or the trees shaded out anything else that tried to grow. But here, true to the local nomenclature, the forest floor was covered with bracken which grew in a thick carpet all around the fallen log.

“We should be safe enough here,” Coup-Bas said. “Unless you want to take him all the way to the vault?”

“No, everyone knows about that. It’s the first place they’ll think to look. Let’s make camp here,” Rit-des-Plaies said.

Rit-des-Plaies was somewhat overestimating the celebrity of this vault, since Corentin had never heard of it, but it certainly sounded like a place where he would not like to be locked up. He was more than happy to stop here. ‘Camp’, however, proved to be something of a euphemism, since they had no tents and it soon became clear the Chouans had no intention of risking giving away their location by making a fire. Corentin had just resigned himself to a cold night of sitting on a log and begun to make his way over to it when something struck him hard on the arse. 

Corentin stumbled forward and turned to find the weregoat standing behind him smugly, the obvious author of this assault. Revenge for the trick he had played with the clothes, no doubt. As he watched, it lowered its head and charged him again. He was afraid to dodge lest he be caught halfway and gored by the tip of one of the sweeping horns, so all he could do was stand in place and wait for it to butt him. This time he took the blow full on the hip and realized his error; as unpleasant as it had been to be hit from behind, at least the target was padded. When the weregoat charged him from the side the horns struck directly against the bone and the cut of his coat afforded him no protection at all.

He bit back a cry of pain and looked to Rit-des-Plaies, not altogether sure whether this qualified as an attack by an animal in which his fellow humans might be expected to intervene, or a beating by one of his captors in which Brochette’s confederates were more likely to look the other way, or perhaps to join in themselves. In either case, Corentin had little choice but to throw himself on their mercy. With his hands bound he had no way to defend himself, and he suspected flight would not be taken in good part. Besides, he had no hope of escaping the weregoat in the dark wood even if he ran.

Rit-des-Plaies looked between Corentin and the goat. The goat pawed at the ground and blatted impatiently.

The Chouan leader laughed. “All right. You carried him all that way; I suppose you’ve earned it.”

That decided the question in the wrong direction as far as Corentin was concerned, a suspicion that was confirmed when Rit-des-Plaies seized him by the collar, dragged him across the clearing and threw him down over the log. For what felt like the twentieth time that night he had the air knocked out of him, and for a moment he just lay there with his nose in the bracken, dazed and miserable.

Rit-des-Plaies pushed the long tails of Corentin’s coat to one side, untied the gusset on his breeches, and yanked them down to his knees. The winter air struck his naked flesh like a slap, and he awakened abruptly to the realization that something bad and bewildering had just happened and he needed to act urgently to stop things from getting any worse. He squirmed helplessly, completely deprived of leverage by his bound hands and Rit-des-Plaies’ grip on his collar.

What were they playing at? Why were they pulling down his breeches? Were they planning to spank him?

“What are you doing? I’m not a child!” he protested.

“Shut up,” Rit-des-Plaies said affably, shoving Corentin down harder against the log. The Chouan leader climbed over it and sat down in the bracken on the other side. He leaned against the log as if it were an ottoman, as comfortable as any bourgeois in his drawing-room, but he kept Corentin pinned down all the while.

“But– He has _horns_ ; I assure you it hurts quite sufficiently with my clothes still on, there really isn’t any need to–“

Corentin stopped short, because something warm and wet had just touched his arse. Was that the goat’s _nose_? He tried to twist around to see, but Rit-des-Plaies was holding him down and he couldn’t get his head up far enough to see over the log.

The wet thing touched him again.

This time Corentin was able to wrench his head around far enough to see behind him out of the corner of his eye. The weregoat came prancing up to him with a queer, stiff-legged gait, its tongue flickering rapidly over its muzzle, and dipped its head to lick his arse. Then it leapt away again, leaving him more bewildered than before.

It wasn’t until the goat came back to him once more and lapped at his hole that he began to understand. For the second time that night, the universe folded itself into a new and terrible configuration.

Corentin was familiar with rape, and he had anticipated the possibility when the Chouans captured him. It would have been foolish not to. Brittany was in a state of siege, and the Chouans were fit men in their prime, away from the comforts of home and deprived of female company for months at a time, constantly engaged in attacks upon civilians they believed were sanctioned by God. Inevitably such crimes were rife. There were plenty of stories about the Blues as well, although Corentin had heard surprisingly little against Hulot’s men during the ten days he’d spent in Fougères.

Francine had reluctantly confessed to him what fate the Chouans had planned for Marie, and Corentin was not so arrogant as to assume that he would be spared the peril Mlle. de Verneuil had so narrowly escaped just because he’d been lucky enough to be born with a cock between his legs. He might not make quite so delectable a victim as his pretty colleague, but he was young, slight, and better groomed than most of the locals – and more importantly, he was the only thing in this clearing that wasn’t a goat, a Chouan, or a tree. If his captors wanted sex they were going to take it from him, and there was very little he could do to stop it.

Such were the hazards of his profession, and Corentin had reconciled himself to them a long time ago. He had been taken against his will before. It hadn’t been very pleasant, but it hadn’t killed him, and he’d lived to see most of the perpetrators die upon the scaffold. His priority at the moment was to appease his captors sufficiently so that he could survive long enough to escape, and if that meant letting some filthy peasant sodomize him then so be it. Had Brochette come to him in human form Corentin would have made a token protest and then yielded as he must.

But nothing – no prior experience, no quantity of sang-froid, no cynical calculation that weighed the inviolability of his arsehole against the grander scheme of things – could have prepared Corentin for this. The horror, the sheer, skin-crawling degradation he felt at the thought of being fucked by an animal was more than he could stand. And not just any animal, not a noble animal, but a _goat_ , of all things – vulgar, obnoxious, malodorous, as common as muck, an inhabitant of ditches and farmyards!

It was worse even than that, because at least a true animal was innocent. If Rit-des-Plaies had held him down so that a real billy goat might bugger him, Corentin would have hated the Chouan for subjecting him to such a loathsome degradation, but he would have had the comfort of knowing the animal was only acting according to its nature, wholly ignorant of the great taboo it violated by rutting into the body of a human. But he was never sure how much of Brochette was looking out at him from the queer horizontal slots in the weregoat’s eyes. Had he succumbed entirely to the bestial urges of his caprine form, seeking only to gratify its animal lusts? Or was there still something of the man in there, relishing Corentin’s humiliation, choosing perhaps to take him in this form rather than the other for the sheer pleasure of the mental anguish he knew it must cause his victim?

The thought was intolerable. Corentin could endure a great many horrors in order to survive, but he could not endure this. He could not even plead for mercy. Speech had deserted him, reason had deserted him; there was nothing left to him but his desperate need to escape. He thrashed frantically, but pinned as he was, with his hands bound behind him, his legs hobbled by his breeches and Rit-des-Plaies gripping his neck, he had no chance at all to get away. All he managed to achieve was an ineffectual see-sawing over the log, which only seemed to excite the weregoat further.

A moment later, a sharp hoof came down on either side of Corentin’s hips as the beast mounted him. It dropped to its knees on the log, locking its hard shins beneath Corentin’s thighs to hold him in place, and he felt the warmth of the goat’s body on his bared skin as the curtain of its hair came down around them. The stench was suffocating. He choked, gagging on the pungent odor, and then felt something moist and round and impossibly hot press up against the chilled pucker of his hole.

Corentin jerked away so violently that he tore a muscle in his side. For a few tantalizing seconds he managed to pull free, but Rit-des-Plaies effortlessly hauled him back into position, and the goat’s forelegs scrabbled on the log until it had secured a tighter grip on his hips. He felt again the hot press of its cock against his hole, and then with a thrust of its hips the weregoat forced its way inside.

He felt a sharp pain as it breached him, for he was cold and extremely unwilling and they had not troubled to prepare him, and he resisted the entry with all his might. His efforts were no proof against the weregoat’s vigorous thrusts, however, and soon it was buried deep within him, merrily rutting away as if he was nothing more than a nanny goat it had encountered in a field. The beast’s prick was impossibly, inhumanly hot. Corentin felt like he was being buggered by a hot poker.

But as much as his mind revolted against it, his body came to accept to the foul use with disturbing ease. The goat’s member was more slender than a human cock, no thicker than three fingers put together, and slick with the fluids of the sheath. It was well lubricated as it pistoned back and forth in his rear passage, and Corentin quickly grew accustomed to its girth. The searing heat faded to a pleasant warmth. He derived no pleasure from the penetration; perhaps the angle was wrong, or perhaps his disgust at the violation was so intense as to render all erotic stimulation impossible. But he could accommodate it. Were it not for the savage thrusts that slammed into his buttocks with bruising force and the irritation of the goat’s rough hair against his bare skin, it would almost have been tolerable.

That seemed worse, somehow, than if the beast had possessed some monstrous cock: an organ of such elephantine dimensions that it must tear him apart by its mere entry, a member sharp as a dagger or barbed like a cat’s. He almost wished that it hurt more. There was a kind of dignity in torture, a consolation in knowing that one’s sufferings had exceeded the limits of bone and sinew. Once the body had broken there was no shame if the mind were to follow in its wake. But for his body to so readily accept this violation… It felt like complicity. If he truly rejected this vile assault with the revulsion it deserved, surely his flesh should have offered more resistance.

And yet, even as he yielded to the weregoat’s thrusts, he could not convince himself that his mind was wrong and his body was right, that he had panicked unduly, that this was no worse than if Brochette had fucked him in the form of a man and in some ways considerably better. As painless as the rape was, Corentin simply could not reconcile himself to it. The hot panting of the weregoat’s breath on his neck, the bony knees that pinned his hips, the rank smell all around him, the very ease with which its hot, slender cock plundered his hole – everything served to remind him that he was being fucked by an animal, albeit one with a human name and perhaps even a human soul.

A human soul… Perhaps that was something he could offer in his defense.

“Aren’t you meant to be good Christians? This is sodomy!” Corentin gasped out, as the goat frantically pounded into him.

“Oh, it’s a terrible sin for a man to lie with a man as he would with a woman,” Rit-des-Plaies agreed cheerfully. “But the Good Lord never said anything about a goat.”

Corentin remembered his religion lessons only dimly, but he was fairly certain that the Good Lord _had_ said something about goats, specifically that he was going to send them all into the eternal fires of Hell. It was a policy that recommended itself more strongly to Corentin with every passing second. Still, the Chouan leader was so obviously delighted with his bit of pharisaical sophistry that there seemed little profit in arguing theology with him.

The weregoat thrust inside Corentin once again with all the delicacy of a soldier ramming wadding down a musket barrel, and to his alarm he felt a dull pain deep in his abdomen. That strange, thin member – the beast must be deep inside him, deeper than any man had ever reached. It finished with an uncanny moan and pulled out, a thin stream of its spend running down Corentin’s crack in its wake.

Corentin went limp with relief. That had been appalling, but it was finished, and perhaps now they would let him rest until morning. After all the night’s adventures that was all he truly wanted: to curl up in a wretched little ball and rest. Tomorrow he would have to find some way to convince them that a ransom would indeed be forthcoming and begin to work on splitting the fault lines in the group, but for now–

He heard the distinctive sound of a bleat behind him.

Corentin wanted to believe it had emerged from the goat that had just finished with him. He wanted to believe it with all his heart, but he had good ears and a spy’s discernment even in extremis, and he knew perfectly well that the bleat had come from his left, too far away to have stemmed from the weregoat behind him, which was now lapping curiously at the little rivulet of its own seed that was dripping down his thighs.

With a sinking dread he craned his neck to look over his shoulder and saw two other goats in the clearing: one a silvery grey in the moonlight, the second dark with a white nose and belly. Their tails were curled stiffly above their backs, and they were circling him with the same peculiar gait he’d observed in the spotted goat. As he watched, the darker one lowered its head and butted the other in the side, and the grey goat scrambled out of its way. The dark goat strutted over to him and lined itself up.

Of course. Of _course_. The Chouans all had those horrible goatskin cloaks – they were all capable of performing the same feat of transformation that Brochette had on the crags of Saint-Sulpice. There wasn’t just one weregoat, there were three – four, if one of them chose to take Rit-des-Plaies’ place at Corentin’s head once it had taken its turn at Corentin’s arse. He gave a groan of despair as he felt the goat clamber up onto the log.

If Brochette had earned his pleasures by serving as a beast of burden, Rit-des-Plaies seemed to have no objection to the others taking theirs for free, for he held Corentin down just as firmly for this rape as the first. The second weregoat – Coup-Bas, it must be, for it was Armérie who had worn the pale goatskin – was no more gentle or more fragrant than its predecessor. It clutched him between its bony knees and pounded into him with single-minded dedication, and Corentin grimly resigned himself to another two rounds of caprine love-making.

The third goat licked at his ear before mounting him in what was perhaps a strange parody of a kiss, but apart from that it went much like the two before. Corentin’s hips were beginning to feel quite sore from the glancing blows the goats struck him with their hooves as they were getting into position and from the way they pinned him down by clamping him between their bony forelegs. His arsehole wasn’t feeling much better. The goats’ cocks might be thin and well lubricated, but they fucked him with a frantic intensity, and there was only so much friction his poor rim could endure. Really, the only thing weregoats had to recommend them as lovers was that they got it over with quickly.

Corentin’s hole squelched repulsively as the third goat pulled out, and he was beginning to feel disgustingly wet and used, but to his relief Rit-des-Plaies showed no signs of rising to strip off his clothes and don his goatskin. Perhaps the Chouan leader had an understandable aversion to fucking a hole that was dripping with goat semen. For a brief, shining moment, Corentin let himself indulge in the hope that it was over.

This hope was dashed by the piebald weregoat, which came sauntering back as soon as the grey goat had finished, pawed briefly at Corentin’s thigh with its hoof, and then lined itself up for another round. Corentin glanced over at Rit-des-Plaies in horror, and the Chouan leader grinned.

“Oh, didn’t I mention? There’s another reason we like to do it this way, besides our religious sentiments. Goats don’t get tapped out the way men do. They can go all night.”

Reluctantly, Corentin looked at what he had until then managed to avoid thinking about – the enormous sacks that hung between the creatures’ legs. The weregoats were no larger than a man, but their scrotums had to be three or four times the size. How could he have believed that a pair of testes each as large as his fist could be emptied of their seed in a single spurt? The weregoats had each given him a generous dollop of their cream, but there must be plenty more in reserve.

“You cannot be serious,” he told the universe bitterly, but as he felt the goat’s cock ram home he knew that whatever evil fate had decreed he must suffer this ordeal was entirely in earnest.

In truth, he should have foreseen it from the beginning. Werewolves were known for their monstrous appetites: for bloodshed, for killing, for consuming living flesh. That was the purpose of them – of the metaphor, Corentin would have said a day ago; now he could not assert with any confidence what was myth and what was truth. But real or fictional, werewolves were the embodiment in animal form of man’s feral instinct for violence: those savage urges that, like Bisclavret, must be banished from society so that civilization might flourish.

There was no such popular lore about were _goats_ – who had even heard of such a thing? – but goat-men were not unknown to antiquity. Corentin had received a thorough classical education; he knew of the satyrs, of their insatiable lusts and their eternally rampant cocks. As the wolf represented man’s appetite for blood, so the goat represented man’s appetite for sex, as voracious and destructive in its own way as the other. Of course the weregoats would not be satisfied to have him only once.

Around the tenth time one of the weregoats took him, Corentin began to weep. He’d been wanting to for hours, since his failed escape or maybe before, when Brochette came so close to cutting his throat. Now he was too exhausted to hold back the tears any longer. There just didn’t seem to be much point. Who was he trying to impress with his stoicism? The goats? The man holding him down so that he could be raped by goats? Whatever hope he’d had of getting through this kidnapping with a shred of dignity intact had vanished the moment a common farm animal put its prick up his arse.

He’d stopped struggling a while back – it hurt when he pressed his bruised hips against the goats’ hard knees, and it never did any good – so Rit-des-Plaies was holding him more loosely now, just resting his hand on Corentin’s back. When the tears came the Chouan leader patted him gently on the head, as he might soothe a fretful child. Neither the tears nor this lackluster consolation made Corentin feel any better, and soon they were freezing on his cheeks, but he still had too much pride to ask Rit-des-Plaies to wipe them away. He just lay over the log with tears dripping down his nose into the bracken.

Around the twentieth time they took him, Corentin stopped counting and let his mind go blank, only jolting back to awareness when another goat mounted him or the beast inside him gave one of those deep thrusts that sparked the dull pain in his gut. The blue light of dawn was showing dimly in the clearing before they finished with him.

He was vaguely conscious of Rit-des-Plaies getting up. All the goats had vanished from the clearing. Coup-Bas and Armérie had resumed their human forms and were putting on their clothes, and the piebald goat was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps Brochette had gone back to Saint-Sulpice to retrieve his own garments. The three Chouans were conversing quietly; Corentin was so tired he couldn’t even tell whether the discussion was in French or Breton.

He slid down from the log and managed to expel most of the foul mess inside of him, wiping himself clean as best he could on the chilly bracken. With an effort, he forced his numb fingers to pull up his breeches, although tying the gusset again was beyond him. Why Rit-des-Plaies hadn’t just undone the buttons – but then, Corentin wouldn’t be able to fasten them, for he couldn’t reach so far in front with his hands bound behind him. After what he had just endured, he couldn’t bear the thought of asking the Chouans for anything, not even to untie him so that he could set his clothing to rights.

As tidy as he could make himself, he curled up at the base of a tree and tried to sleep. As the rapes wore on he’d become increasingly chilled, and he wasn’t sure whether it was the winter cold or simple shock. It did occur to him that he might not wake, but out of all his prospects that didn’t seem like such a bad option. It was supposed to be a pleasant death, cold. People just felt sleepy and warm, and no goats raped them. The Gars was dead, so whatever else happened, Corentin had completed his mission. Perhaps Fouché wouldn’t be too angry with him if he just closed his eyes and went to sleep forever.

He was so stupefied with the cold that he scarcely noticed Rit-des-Plaies walking over to him. The Chouan was standing at his feet before Corentin registered his presence.

“No so warm, those fine clothes of yours,” Rit-des-Plaies observed.

Corentin wanted to tell him that they served perfectly well under ordinary circumstances, they just weren’t suited for sleeping on the ground in the middle of Frimaire like a barbarian, but it didn’t seem wise to quarrel with his captors over something so trivial. In any case, he was shivering so hard he feared he’d bite his tongue if he tried to speak.

“Best you come in with me, then,” the Chouan said, and before Corentin could venture an opinion on this proposal Rit-des-Plaies swooped down, hooked him under his armpit and hauled him to his feet, taking no notice of how Corentin’s cold-stiffened legs gave out beneath him. The Chouan half-dragged, half-carried him to the other side of the clearing, the bracken there apparently being superior to the spot Corentin had chosen, and casually tossed him to the ground.

If Corentin had ever possessed the captivity to land well with his hands tied behind his back, the past hours of misery had stripped it from him. He failed to get his legs under him in time and landed hard on his elbow, and a blinding pain shot up his arm to linger in his bound hands. Had it not been for the cushion of ferns he might have broken his arm. As it was the sensation was akin to being thrown down onto a straw mattress – not a fatal event but a shocking one, especially to a body already so battered and ill-used. He didn’t have the strength to scream, but he gave a strangled whimper and curled into a tight little ball as if that might somehow relieve the pain in his elbow and wrists. If anything, the strain on his arms made it worse.

He became dimly aware of an arm reaching over him, and then he was rolled over and pulled towards his captor. He moaned and tried to pull away – the past few hours had impressed upon Corentin a firm belief that nothing good happened when Rit-des-Plaies laid his hands on him – but he had no leverage and no strength left to resist, and it was no trouble at all for the Chouan to draw him in and hold him close against his breast.

“ _Gric, gric,_ ” Rit-des-Plaies said, laying his goatskin over them both. The words were incomprehensible, but the tone was soothing, and a faint warmth was beginning to permeate where Corentin was pressed against the Chouan’s chest. Cautiously, he uncurled a little. The goatskin stank, but after spending so long as the victim of the weregoats’ lusts Corentin doubted he smelled much better himself, and already his nose was growing accustomed to the foul odor. At least the damn thing was warm. For the first time in what seemed like hours, he had stopped shivering.

Corentin would not have believed that he could sleep in the arms of a man who just a short while before had held him down for a horrific and incomprehensible rape, with his body aching with countless bruises, at the mercy of a gang of counter-revolutionary cutthroats who were awaiting a ransom he knew would not be forthcoming. But warmth and exhaustion and the temporary relief of terror had their inevitable effect, and he was unconscious almost before he could articulate the thought.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, the obvious implication is that they're actually wearing _peaux de boucs_ , but the title is more legible to Anglophone readers this way. My apologies to any French readers offended by my goat misgendering.
> 
> My apologies to Breton readers just... in general.
> 
> [Here’s a dictionary](https://books.google.com/books?id=vM9aAAAAcAAJ), for anyone who wants to brush up on their Breton-with-early-nineteenth-century-orthography.


End file.
